Earlier UTC Meetings

This page provides information about the earlier Unicode Technical Committee meetings,
prior to UTC #132 in mid-2012. The roster of meeting information is divided
into three tables, to reflect three distinct historical phases in meeting and
document management.

1997–2012: Era of Coordinated UTC and L2 Registers and Meetings

From 1997 through 2012, the Unicode Technical Committee and the
U.S. Tag to JTC1/SC2, the INCITS L2 committee, systematically
coordinated their document registers and meeting schedules. There
was a high degree of overlap among the participants in these two
committees, and this coordination proved the most efficient way
to advance the synchronized work on the Unicode Standard and
ISO/IEC 10646.

During most of this period, the UTC and L2 maintained a single document
register, for their mutual convenience. Nearly all documents used the "L2/YY-NNN"
numbering convention, regardless of their status. For more information
about the document registers, see the
UTC Document Registry.

1991–1996: Era of Distinct UTC and X3L2 Registers and Meetings

Before 1997, the situation was rather distinct. The U.S. Tag to
JTC1/SC2 was then known as ANSI X3L2. It maintained its own
document register, using the "X3L2/YY-NNN" document numbering convention.
The UTC had its separate document register. The document numbering conventions
for the UTC varied somewhat over the years, but for ease of reference
are regularized in the table to the predominant "UTC/YYYY-NNN" convention.

The Unicode
Consortium was incorporated on January 3, 1991. The initial meeting of
the Unicode Board of Directors on January 25, 1991 established the Unicode
Technical Committee and its processes.
The formal agenda documents, minutes, and the UTC document register itself
commenced as of UTC #44, held on February 1, 1991.

Prior to 1994, the UTC and X3L2 meetings were not mutually coordinated.
The years 1994 and 1995 saw the first limited attempts at scheduling coordination,
when UTC #61 and X3L2 #163 were scheduled on adjacent days in Cupertino
in June, 1994, and when UTC #65 and X3L2 #165 were scheduled on adjacent
days in Sunnyvale in June, 1995. The period from December 1995 through
1996 was a time of transition, when X3L2 meetings started to be formally
co-located with UTC meetings; however, during 1996 not all of the UTC
meetings were held jointly with X3L2, and the document register merger
had not yet occurred.

1989–1990: Era of the Unicode Working Group (UWG)

The UTC can trace its committee origins back to the first informal "Unicode meeting" held
at Xerox on February 9, 1989. The term "Unicode Working Group" was coined later,
but was then applied retroactively to the numbered sequence of meetings from
the earliest records, in which they are identified as "UWG #1", and so on.
When the Unicode Consortium was incorporated and formally created the
Unicode Technical Committee, it inherited the meeting numbering and the
accumulated decisions of the Unicode Working Group as of January, 1991.

Notes were taken during the UWG meetings and those notes were referred
to at the time as "minutes" and distributed to participants. Much of this
material is available in the paper archives, but there was no
document register maintained during this early period. Some commentary
regarding decisions also survives in archived email records. Some of the recovered material is listed in the
UWG Meeting Notes,
for historical reference. Further early meeting minutes and notes will be made
available as they can be scanned and posted.

For completeness, the table of UWG meetings includes other important
non-UWG meetings during 1989 and 1990 which had a bearing on the early drafting
of the Unicode Standard, but which are not part of the UWG numbered
sequence.

The very earliest meetings
were rather ad hoc, and often were held for just a couple hours on a Friday
afternoon. It was not until 1990 that UWG meetings became full-day meetings
and were more formally organized.

For more information about the very early history of Unicode, see the
interviews and narratives collected at
Early Years of Unicode covering events from 1985 through 1988.